Interview (Part 2) I Bill Novomisle (KorumLegal)

So when does a law firm or corporate decide they want to engage KorumLegal? At what point in their problem-solving journey do you come in?

Our clients are firms and corporates, both large and small.  Broadly speaking, our clients engage us for top down reasons or bottom up reasons.

On the top down side, we might work with a new company with a few hires that is ready to set up their legal department. They might be interested in understanding what the overall legal function actually looks like, in terms of the components of people, process and technology. In other scenarios, we might work with a well-established legal department with a corporation vision or annual strategy. That strategy might include the adoption of new tools and platforms to help make data-driven decisions and risk analysis. 

On the bottom up side, we might work with clients facing a pain point in their legal processes. They might be spending a tremendous amount of time churning out repetitive contracts, or have difficulties keeping track of version or templates. They may want to increase the speed and efficiency of the legal function, without adding to their headcount.  We help these clients to streamline the legal function and leverage technology, so they’re servicing clients more effectively. 

Have you noticed any trends within South East Asia, in particular?

Speaking very broadly, I have seen a lot of activity in contract generation and contract life cycle management. That is one of the biggest pain points in this region.

This region tends to be unique because most businesses are multi-jurisdictional - it’s very rare to encounter a business that only operates in Singapore, for example. That means, as you expand across jurisdictions, you need a certain level of configurability. You also need multi-language capability.

This contrasts with the U.S, where it is not unusual to find a business that only does business in the U.S, or North America. In those scenarios, it is easier to shoehorn people, process and technology into those jurisdictions. It’s an imperfect fit, but you can usually squeeze it in. In South East Asia, that is a little bit harder.

How do you work with your clients to help solve these problems?

The way we work with our clients varies quite a bit. Our process improvement methodology is usually implemented in about eight weeks. As part of that, we do a change management protocol, because change is hard – re-engineering a process means doing day to day work in a different way. We try to give them something small, manageable and digestible. Clients often aren’t willing to commit to a very large amount of money or time for a massive transformation.

Our approach to technology implementation is really variable. There are very small technology implementations that might only affect one practise area including six to twelve end users. This typically might take a couple of months. Otherwise, we might help implement enterprise wide technology, such as knowledge or document management. This is a much longer journey.

What can students to do understand more about the business of law and legal ops?

Dive in! Look for the opportunities. If you’re at a law firm, find your head of knowledge management or innovation and talk to them. See if you can help out with any knowledge management projects. If not, do they have a law librarian? A lot of law librarians are heavily involved in legal technology. In fact, a lot of the initial seeds of legal operations can be traced back to the work of law librarians.

If you have the opportunity to work in house, there are tonnes of opportunities. Talk to the IT person servicing the legal department – find out what are the challenges of servicing the legal department. Talk to the general counsel or deputy general counsel about how they approach the synergy between people, process and technology in the way they run the legal department and manage outside counsel.

Within your school itself, start with the law library – they are often familiar with a lot of legal tech. There are also some great new courses aimed specifically at LegalTech and legal operations. There’s so much information out there. Read the Legal IT insider. Get a student membership to CLOC. Attend a conference. See what is out there!